Background
South African based Business Partners Limited are one of the leading business loan providers for viable small to medium enterprises (SME’s) within the region. Providing loan finance ranging from R500,000 to R50million to all business owners who have a viable formal business and require finance for expansion, working capital, equipment, franchising or business property.
Business Partners Ltd entire loan portfolio runs on SAP Loans Management, which they implemented back in 2009, and started leveraging bancon’s managed services offering in April 2022.
The Challenge
As one of South Africa’s biggest lenders of SME loans, Business Partners Ltd is consistently looking to optimise it’s loan book whilst also continuing to invest in introducing new products and self-service features to the market and customers.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Business Partners Ltd saw how, through their semi-automated loan book, clients directly benefitted from having access to Covid-19 aid and ‘cash-in-hand’ quickly and efficiently. Enabling Business Partners Ltd to roll out new Covid-19 relief programmes in record time to truly support business customers during a very difficult trading period.
The pace of business change hasn’t slowed down since the height of the pandemic, acknowledging this Business Partners Ltd knew they needed to continue to keep up with customer demands, continue to deliver and be ahead of the curve. This led them to start looking for a new strategic IT solutions provider in early 2022, a provider who could give them the hands-on support they needed to increase delivery throughout, produce insight and best practice from around the world and help them enhance their SAP Banking landscape.
Following an initial introduction meeting, Business Partners Ltd chose bancon as their strategic SAP partner, given their significant presence in South Africa and exposure to best practice through their global operations.
The Solution
To begin, bancon needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of their day-to-day processes, and perform a thorough analysis into the existing overall SAP system to understand the current state of the landscape that enabled Business Partners Ltd to perform its critical business as usual operations. This analysis not only enabled bancon to act on service support requests, including how much time would be needed to perform the fixes on the productive system, but also enabled the better prioritisation of enhancements and optimisations that remained on the back-log since 2020/21.
Following this prioritisation, we were then able to start working closely with their business teams to introduce the enhancements and optimisation - this is where the real value lied, allowing Business Partners Ltd to sweat their SAP Banking tech-stack and drive efficiency for them and their clients.
In addition, we collectively explored innovations that could be introduced into the SAP tech-stack in 2023, including S/4HANA, SAP’s Process Orchestration solution and new software to facilitate syndicated and complex hierarchical structured lending with the SAP Fioneer Complex Loans solution.
The Results
The bancon team with their deep knowledge of SAP, dramatically reduced service lead times, increased throughput of optimisation and set the foundations for Business Partners Ltd to introduce new products in 2023. Most notable was how Business Partners Ltd and bancon experts forged strong, reliable and frictionless ways of working which contributed hugely to the collective success.
Faiez Hartley, Head of Information Technology, Business Partners Ltd "With bancon by our side, we’ve been able to deliver several key optimisations during 2022. Together we’ve laid a solid foundation to further increase the pace of which we introduce new features in 2023 and I look forward to launching two new strategic products into the market this year.”
Marinda Fullard, Associate Director S/4HANA Loans Management, Financial Services bancon "Business Partners Ltd are leaders within their field and are recognised as being the ‘‘go-to’’ lender for Small and Medium Enterprises. We’re proud to form part of their story and to provide them with IT solutions to enable them to continue to support the businesses of Southern Africa post-pandemic. Their team of experts really complement that of our own, making for a unique collaboration.”
